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Lecture by Nicole Lazzaro

Games combine goals, actions, motivations, and emotions. More than a quest for points and badges, games create engagement by crafting specific emotional responses from what players do. In this talk -- The Four Keys: Unlocking Human Potential Through Play -- Nicole Lazzaro will share highlights from XEODesign's 20 years of research into how game designers create emotions from novelty, challenge, friendship, and meaning to create engagement, performance, and productivity.

Lazzaro is a world-renowned game researcher, designer, and speaker who makes games more fun. She discovered the Four Keys to Fun in 2004, and today the model is used by hundreds of thousands of game developers worldwide. She used this model to design the iPhone's first accelerometer game in 2007, now called Tilt World. Fast Company has called her one of the 100 most influential women in high tech, Gamasutra calls her one of the top 20 women working in video games, and she's one of the top 10 women in gamification. Lazzaro's work has been widely cited by global news media such as Wired, Fast Company, CNN, CNET, the Hollywood Reporter, Red Herring, and the Boston Globe.

Lazzaro has advised the White House and the U.S. State Department on the use of games to unlock human potential to improve our world. For the past two decades, as the CEO of XEODesign, she has improved hundreds of millions of player experiences for companies such as Ubisoft, EA, Disney, and Cartoon Network, and she has worked on best-selling franchises such as Myst, Diner Dash, Pogo, and the Sims. One of the pioneers in applying game design outside of games, she designed game-inspired UI for Oracle, Cisco, Kaiser, Sun, Roxio, and others as early as 1992.